Dick Bennett's focus on US wars and warming and their causes, consequences, and cures and the works of authors analyzing and promoting the search for peace

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

POLICE NEWSLETTER #2, TOWARD SERVICE

OMNI

POLICE USA NEWSLETTER #2, September 3, 2014

COMPILED BY DICK BENNETT FOR A CULTURE OF PEACE AND
JUSTICE

(#1 August 17, 2014)

What’s at stake: We
live in “a country that seems at once
happy to whine about “Big Government” and slam civilian public servants as
“government bureaucrats” – all while telling pollsters it holds the biggest
appendage of “Big Government” – aka the military – in great
esteem. Thanks to such a martial culture, few ever stop to wonder why our
politics so often distinguishes between civilian and military public service,
and then insinuates that one is to be denigrated and the other venerated.

I am the
grandson of a veteran, and so among other things, Memorial Day brings up early
childhood memories of my dad’s dad telling me about his public service in the
military. While he gave me kid-friendly versions of his recollections, I was
just old enough to vaguely understand his allusions to the injuries,
casualties, lost friends and the trauma he likely experienced while serving
overseas in World War II. Those allusions to the downsides of war – downsides
that are too often glossed over in our sanitized recollections of World War II
– gradually informed the way I came to see Memorial Day as a sacred moment to
honor those who lost their lives in service to America.

In recent
years, though, I have found our national celebration of Memorial Day lacking because
while I am indeed the grandson of a soldier, I am also the son, son-in-law,
nephew and friend of many other kinds of public servants. Through their
civilian work, I have come to understand public service as something much more
than only military service. Trouble is, while there may be afew lower profile days meant to
honor their service, these public servants are not included as part of the
high-profile Memorial Day – even though they should be.

Remember:
Memorial Day is not supposed to be a national excuse to have a barbecue in
celebration of the kickoff of summer – it is supposed to be about honoring
those who lost their lives while serving in the armed forces. A holiday of such
significance – including a designated off day for many workers – is more than
warranted. Regardless of the judgments we might make about whether particular
wars are just, smart or necessary, these men and women who lost their lives
carrying out the war decisions of our country do deserve to be honored for
their sacrifice.

However, it
doesn’t insult my grandfather or his fallen brothers in arms to point out that
the narrowness of the holiday is both painfully outdated and unduly
exclusionary – the latter in a way that buttresses pernicious ideological
judgments about different kinds of public service.

On the first
point about Memorial Day’s scope being outdated – let’s remember that in
so many ways, our government is telling us that we are now in a permanent
state of war (officially deemed “persistent
conflict”), one demanding that, as the saying goes, we see “the
whole world as a battlefield.” If that is true, then it logically
follows that soldiers are not the only ones defending our national security –
nor losing their lives – on the figurative frontlines. On the contrary, if this
is truly a boundary-less war against all kinds of threats, then it stands to
reason that our national security is being protected not just by soldiers, but
also by police officers, firefighters, first responders, teachers and myriad
other public servants.

The best way
to appreciate that truism is to take a look at all the civilian public servants
who have lost their lives defending the country.

These are
exactly the kind of public servants who, along with fallen soldiers, should be
remembered on Memorial Day, but who aren’t.

One argument
against including them is the fact that not all of these
public servants are killed trying to protect what America selectively
sanctifies as “national security.” For instance, some of these public servants
are first
responders who die running into fertilizer plant explosions. Some of them
are public
school teachers who die trying to protect kids from being gunned down
by mass shooters. Some of them are police
officers killed while trying to keep the peace at public events. Despite
the fact that these kind of heroic life-risking efforts are the definition of
working to secure the country from danger (ie. “national security”), they are
simply not seen as “defending America” or “serving our country” or protecting
“national security” in the same way martial action is – and so they aren’t part
of Memorial Day.

That gets to
the latter point about today’s holiday being unnecessarily exclusionary. In
excluding the memories of those civilian public servants killed in the line of
duty, Memorial Day seems to be contributing to a larger value judgment about
different kinds of public service. Specifically, whether deliberately or
inadvertently, it seems to be suggesting that martial service should be
automatically held in higher regard than any other kind of public service. In
other words, the Orwellian message seems to be: some public servants are more
equal than others.

This, no
doubt, is hardly surprising in a country where such a subjective value judgment
is the unquestioned assumption undergirding our political discourse. Show me a
Republican politician, and I’ll show you a person who is probably happy to block
aid to first responders and to slam police and
firefighters unions – all while pledging undying fealty to soldiers.
Similarly, show me the typical Democratic politician, and I’ll show you a
person who is probably thrilled to portray
teachers as leeches all while praising our men and women in the armed
forces.

In both
cases, politicians are reflecting a country that seems at once happy to whine
about “Big Government” and slam civilian public servants as “government
bureaucrats” – all while telling pollsters it holds the biggest appendage of
“Big Government” – aka the military – in great
esteem. Thanks to such a martial culture, few ever stop to wonder why our
politics so often distinguishes between civilian and military public service,
and then insinuates that one is to be denigrated and the other venerated.

Of course,
both sets of public servants deserve America’s honor and respect, but only one
set of public servants really gets it from our country. That’s an enormous
political and cultural problem that ends up destructively distorting so much of
our country’s public policies. However, it can start to be fixed with modest
steps – like, say, officially expanding the Memorial Day holiday to include all public
servants – martial and civilian – killed in the line of duty.

It sounds
small, and for those who see Memorial Day as nothing more than the beginning of
summer, perhaps it will mean nothing. But to those of who take the holiday
seriously – and especially to those of us with familial connections to both
martial and civilian public service – it would send a powerful message that
there are many honorable ways to serve one’s country, and that losing one’s
life in one form of national service is no less worthy of remembrance than
losing it in any other form of service.

David
Sirota is a senior writer for the International Business Times and the
best-selling author of the books "Hostile Takeover," "The
Uprising" and "Back to Our Future." E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow
him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.

Perversely,
the criminal justice system gives officers an incentive to perjure themselves.

Excessive Force, US
Police Violence

In
2013 British Police Fired Guns 3 TimesPublic Radio International, Reader Supported News, August 24, 2014
Excerpt: "In 2012, 409 people were shot and killed by American police in
what were termed justifiable shootings. In that same year, British police
officers fired their weapons just once. No one was killed."READ
MORE

Ferguson and America's Love Affair With
Violence
by Derek FloodBefore
opening her private praxis as a psychotherapist, my wife worked with
institutionalized mental patients. ... Because of laws passed that focused on
protecting patients rights and dignity, the days of strapping mentally ill
patients to a gurney or pumping them full of sedatives and throwing them in a
rubber room are increasingly becoming a thing of the past, and were
non-existent where she worked. So the staff learned other ways to keep safe
and deescalate volatile situations. Given that, I have to ask: If my tiny
wife can handle an angry 6-foot paranoid schizophrenic man, shouldn’t cops be
able to learn to do the same?

Militarization

Why
Is Homeland Security So Busy Arming Cops to Fight Americans?Trevor Timm, Guardian UK, Reader
Supported News, Sept. 2, 2014
Timm writes: "For three weeks and counting, America has raged against
the appalling behavior of the local police in Ferguson, Missouri, and for
good reason: automatic rifles pointed at protesters, tank-like armored trucks
blocking marches, the teargassing and arresting of reporters, tactics unfit
even for war zones - it was all enough to make you wonder whether this was America
at all."READ MORE

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, Op-Ed,
NationofChange, July 18, 2014
A bright light needs to be shined on the policies, practices and weaponry
that are being used. It’s time for police to serve the people.

Hayes Brown, News Investigation, NationofChange, July
18, 2014
The matter of Ferguson and arm transfers must be discussed. A review by
Congress can’t be silenced or one-sided—this is a serious problem.

We continue
our conversation with Yvonne Ng, senior archivist for WITNESS, a group
that trains and supports people using video in their fight for human rights.
She has been giving advice for the growing number of people filming protests,
human rights violations and police abuse with their smartphones and video
cameras — particularly with respect to how to properly preserve such video. She
co-authored their resource, "Activists’ Guide to Archiving Video."

AMY GOODMAN: This
is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace
Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well,
we continue our conversation on the growing number of people filming police
abuse on their smartphones and with video cameras. Yvonne Ng is the senior
archivist for WITNESS, which trains and supports people using video in
their fight for human rights. She co-authored their "Activists’ Guide to
Archiving Video," which is available in
English and Spanish and Arabic, after hearing from activists that this was a
skill set that they were largely missing.

Welcome
to Democracy Now!

YVONNE NG: Thank
you for having me.

AMY GOODMAN: So,
before we talk about archiving, how people should actually film when they want
to document something?

YVONNE NG: Yeah,
so, a few tips that I can share is, well, first of all, be prepared. So bring
extra memory cards and extra batteries with you. So, if you’re filming an
incident and you’re afraid that footage might be confiscated from you, you want
to swap out those cards and preferably work in pairs or in teams, so you can
hand off those cards to somebody else. The second thing is to, when you’re
filming, document landmarks that are notable or street signs, and this makes it
easier for people to verify and identify your video later on. So we’ve seen
this, for example, in Syria, where activists are using mosques as ways to
identify where certain undocumented footage is taking place and so that they can
map where things are happening.

Arkansas is represented in
Congress by two senators and four representatives. Here is how to reach them.
None of the senators or representatives publishes his e-mail address, but each
can be contacted by filling in forms offered through his website.